To the serious Republican reformers, to be “a diplomat and a vote getter’ was to be a fraud, offering a smile in place of good government.
By William Stimson
A hundred years ago Spokane was a wild place. On any given night it entertained thousands of miners, railroaders, lumberjacks and farmhands seeking escape from the grueling work of opening the West.
Saloons and the breweries that supplied them constituted the town’s major industry. The center of this industry was the two blocks of Howard Street from the river to Riverside Avenue. Seven nights a week these streets shimmered under the glow of gaslights from bar windows. When the doors swung open the street filled with the sound of piano or organ music and revelling voices. Prostitutes (local churches and police estimated 300-500 women) trolled sidewalks day and night. The alleys off Howard hid opium dens.
At the southeast corner of Howard and Front (now Spokane Falls Boulevard) was the infamous Dutch Jake’s Coeur d’ Alene Theater. The first floor of this casino was crowded with gaming tables,
a bar and a stage for risque theatricals. Upper stories were party rooms for what was called, ambiguously, “box rustling.” Dutch Jake made no excuses or apologies for his business. In fact, every once in a while he would have the “theater’s” house band lead a parade down Riverside, with the house women in rouge and feathers following behind in buggies, waving to shoppers along Riverside Avenue.
Naturally this activity outraged Spokane’s growing population of middle class, family-oriented citizens. But they couldn’t do much about it. Dutch Jake was friends with the mayor and a majority of the city council.
Spokane’s politics at the opening of the last century was a protracted battle between the “saloon men,” as the Review characterized the local Democratic party, not entirely unfairly, and what the Review called the “decent element.”
The eventual outcome of this battle did more than clean up the city. It established Spokane’s political system for the next century. The most important man in Spokane’s 20th century politics, the first William Cowles, thereafter viewed local political arguments as debates between advocates of vice and “the decent element.” The outrageous behavior of Dutch Jake and his ilk also exaggerated an already hyperactive sense of civic responsibility in the founding Cowles. If the newspaper did not step up and take responsibility for the welfare of the town, who would?
Cowles attacked the brewery and saloon interests with a drumbeat of exposes, editorials and satirical cartoons. Yet they remained in secure control of city hall. So in the city council elections of 1905, the Review unapologetically conducted a political campaign to elect a Republican reform ticket. The Republican nominee, W.H. Acuff, was the subject of constant front-page stories in which his supporters were quoted about his virtues: “Businessmen Indorse Acuff”; “Acuff’s Men Strong For Him” (the employees in Acuff’s own mill planned to vote for him); “D.C. Corbin Declares for Acuff.” A week before the election, the headline was: “All Classes Indorse Acuff.” That story began:
“With unstinted praise the leading businessmen, professional men and representative citizens continue unhesitatingly to indorse the candidacy of W.H. Acuff for mayor. These friends of Mr. Acuff are on every hand and in every class, and their praises of him as their candidate are uttered on the streets, in the stores, in the offices and in the factories.”
The only story explaining why anyone might back Acuff’s opponent, Floyd Daggett, was one headlined: “‘Dutch Jake Boosts Daggett.” A few days before the election, the Review carried a cartoon of the Republican Acuff standing with the popular Republican President Theordore Roosevelt, and next to them Daggett standing with a decadent-looking Dutch Jake Goetz.
The one extended endorsement for Daggett carried in the Review was that of Dutch Jake himself. A reporter interviewed Goetz just before the election, taking the opportunity to mock his German accent:
“By der vay, Floyd Daggett-if any von should told you,” the paper reported Goetz saying, “is making a greadt rafce for mayor, chust now. Dat vas a fine cartoon of Floyd Daggett und Gill and me in der Review dis mornin. De only trouble vas der baper didn’t haf Chohn L. Sullifan along mit me und Daggett.” By “Chohn L. Sullifan” was meant John L. Sullivan, the world champion boxer, who Goetz had just brought to town to put on a series of exhibition matches.The Review story on Dutch Jake contained this observation: “In action, ‘Dutch Jake’ is a diplomat and a vote getter only second to Floyd Daggett. . . . He gives the glad hand and the glad smile, and makes friends all down the line.”
This was not, of course, meant to be a compliment. To the serious Republican reformers of Spokane’s local government, to be “a diplomat and a vote getter” was to be a fraud, offering a smile in place of good government. The Review editorialized about the Democratic candidate for mayor, Floyd Daggett: “Mr. Daggett. . . . has affable manners, is a good mixer and makes friends readily, but experience has also shown . . . that these qualities, however admirable in a social way, are quite distinct from the rugged qualifications that go to make up a first class executive.”
After following the Review’s coverage of the 1905 campaign, many readers must have been astounded by the outcome. The Review’s day-after-election headline read: “Democrats Sweep the City.” Was the majority of Spokane in support of the vice that the Review had so carefully connected to the Democrats?
The Review itself did not draw that conclusion. “Apparently,” the paper editorialized, as it had of Dutch Jake, “a large number of voters preferred the glad hand and the coaxing voice to the more rugged qualities that make for safe and prudent leadership.”
The eventual outcome of this battle against the “saloon men” did more than clean up the city. It established Spokane’s political system for the next century. The most important man in Spokane’s 20th century politics, the first William Cowles, thereafter viewed local political arguments as debates between advocates of vice and “the decent element.”
The thing that kept Dutch Jake, Mayor Daggett and the rest of their party in office was that they were popular in the literal sense of being “of the people.” Their power came from their origins in the neighborhoods, where they were known individually by many people. Informal leaders like Dutch Jake and fellow saloon-keeper Jimmy Durkin were not just “liquor interests.” They became minor folk heros to Spokane’s lower classes. Both Dutch Jake and Durkin often twitted the big shots in town with pranks, like insisting upon being the largest doners to anti-saloon campaigns. With their connections in city hall they could get things done, like get someone a job. It was said, probably truly, that neither Dutch Jake nor Durkin ever sent a hungry man away from their establishments just because he was broke.
In the next city election, 1909, the Review once again sponsored the Republican candidate on its front pages. And once again its candidate got clobbered in the primaries, this time by not one, but two different Democrats.
But one of those Democrats, Nelson Pratt, was a reform candidate for clamping down on the saloons. Consequently, the Spokesman-Review sponsored his candidacy in the final election. At the same time, Spokane’s suburbs were filling out with middle class voters who saw liquor as the root of evil. These new voters, plus the Democratic Party label, plus the Spokesman-Review’s rallying of Republican voters for Pratt, brought to office for the first time a mayor antagonistic to the liquor interests and friendly to the Spokesman-Review.
Newly elected Mayor Pratt immediately challenged the saloon lords. He ordered the police to strictly enforce laws that said the interior to a saloon must be visible at all times from the street. This was mostly a nuisance to saloon keepers, who assumed their customers did not want to be viewed from the street while they were having a drink. The Democratic city council responded to this important part of its constituency by ordering police commissioner Carl Tuerke to cease enforcing the law. When Tuerke ignored the order, the council voted seven-to-three to fire him.
Members of the anti-Cowles Pan-Tans insisted they had done nothing wrong.
The fired police commissioner got revenge by revealing that dozens of local politicians were members of a secret organization called the “Pan-Tans.” It included four of the ten city council members, two county commissioners, three or four judges, and assorted other public officials, for a total of about 75 members. Their motto was “One for all and all for one.”
Members of the Pan-Tans insisted they had done nothing wrong other than to coordinate their strategy to oppose the will of certain business leaders, led by William Cowles. An official investigation by a committee reported it could find no instance of improper influence through the organization. However, the committee added, a secret connection among public servants would almost certainly lead to abuses.
The Spokesman-Review characterized the Pan-Tans as a malevolent “dark lantern society” controlling the fate of the city. Probably the Pan-Tans were just a political alliance that met in secret because, as the Review itself pointed out, knowledge that they were coordinating their efforts “might spoil the practical features” of such coordination. But once revealed, the members of the organization were defenseless to the innuendos of the Review and other critics.
A Democratic council member who did not belong to the Pan-Tans, Jacob Schiller, turned the tables on the Spokesman-Review by claiming that it was the newspaper which was running Spokane. Schiller accused Mayor Pratt of taking anti-saloon orders from publisher William Cowles. Schiller said he would resign rather than have the council’s actions directed by the publisher of the Spokesman-Review. “I am willing to serve the city to the best of my ability, but I will not be dictated to by this rotten, dirty sheet or its owner. . . . This town is being run by a single newspaper.”
In an editorial, the Review welcomed Schiller’s offer to resign. It allowed he was “in many ways a valuable member of the city council, and he possesses in a high degree qualities that fit him to serve as a public official.” Unfortunately, said the Review, “he has apparently been forced by his private business associations to line up with the saloons.”
In midst of this controversy, Mayor Pratt wrote an open letter to the citizenry of Spokane saying in his opinion the mayor-council form of government did not work. Pratt announced he was appointing a committee to explore other forms of local government for Spokane. Two months later that committee recommended Spokane switch to a commissioner form of government. The following summer of 1910, a citizen group collected enough signatures to force the city council to call an immediate election of freeholders who would draw up a new form of government.
The Spokesman-Review took the lead in this campaign. It ran stories and hosted speakers to talk about the wonders that the commissioner form of government had accomplished in other cities. In this campaign, however, the Review faced a new set of opponents. Two hundred prominent businessmen, including, for example, J.M. Comstock of the Crescent Department Store, F.R. Culbertson, owner of the other large department store in town, and Will Graves, brother and partner of millionaire developer Jay P. Graves, signed a petition arguing that the new commissioner plan was too radical a change in Spokane’s government. They sponsored another slate of freeholder candidates to inject other possibilities.
The control of a newspaper was a great asset in this debate. The Pratt-Cowles group won and installed the commissioner form of government.
The election of 1910 transformed Spokane’s politics. For one thing, it changed Spokane’s feisty newspaper, the Spokesman-Review, into a sponsor and partner of local government rather than a critic of it.
That same election dismantled a raucous, wide-open neighborhood-based political system that gave lowly citizens a genuine voice in what happened in city hall. Jacob Schiller, with his grudge, real or supposed, against the Cowles, no longer had a forum in local government to act upon these complaints. He and his tradition in local government were eliminated by the commissioner form of government, which elected members at-large and not from neighborhoods. Schiller might be regarded as the patron saint of Spokane’s “naysayer” tradition.
The crucial change, though, was to place Spokane’s future on automatic pilot. The theory behind the new commissioner form of government was that a city did not need political direction. Its tasks were straightforward, and all that was required of political leaders was technocratic execution. Thus Spokane came to be led by a “Commissioner of Public Utilities,” a “Commissioner of Public Safety,” a “Commissioner of Public Works,” a “Commissioner of Public Affairs,” and a “Commissioner of Finance,” no one of them in charge.
It turned out to be a weak form of government, so weak that Spokane would effectively be led by a shadow government of businessmen.
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